My Favorite Hitman Movies: A Guest Post by Rob Hart

By Rob Hart / June 18, 2024 at 1:57 am

No-nonsense assassins and hitmen with personal vendettas have been a part of our culture for decades. From Quentin Tarantino movies to Tom Cruise feature films and Keanu Reeves’ all too believable fighting sequences filling up the silver screens, it’s safe to say that we love a good hitman adventure. Read on to discover Rob Hart’s personal favorite stars and the movies that inspired his own action-packed tale, Assassins Anonymous, in his exclusive essay down below.

Hardcover $28.00

Assassins Anonymous

By Rob Hart

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Hardcover $28.00

Step one: admit you’re a serial killer. Step two: believe a power greater than yourself can help you stop killing people. Step three: obsess over this new book.

Assassins Anonymous follows Mark, once the deadliest assassin in the world. His alias, the Pale Horse, struck fear into the heart of anyone who heard it and knew what it meant.

The book finds him in a recovery program for killers, having decided he no longer wants to kill people. So of course, when someone from his past shows up looking to do him harm, things go sideways.

A few novels served as inspiration for this, including Chris Holm’s excellent The Killing Kind and Red Right Hand, which follow Michael Hendricks, an assassin who will take out the assassin trying to kill you—if you’re willing to pay. There are also the knock-out Nena Knight novels, starting with Her Name is Knight, by Yasmin Angoe.

But I also wanted the pulse-pounding action to feel cinematic. I looked toward some of my favorite hitman movies. At the top of the list is Leon: The Professional—not just for the nail-biting shootouts, but for Jean Reno’s quiet, sad performance as a lonely Italian assassin living alone in New York City, until he takes a young Natalie Portman under his wing.

Then there are the John Wick movies, a series that I love even more with each subsequent entry, culminating in the fourth, which has at least three all-time actions scenes—and an amazing turn from Donnie Yen as the blind assassin Caine.

It’s not just about the action. I was interested in the psychology, too. That’s why I rewatched Le Samouraï, a French film released in 1967 and starring Alain Delon as Jef Costello—a quieter film, featuring another lonely hitman.

And then there’s Collateral, in which Tom Cruise plays Vincent, a hitman who enlists an unwitting cab driver (Jamie Foxx as Max), to drive him around Los Angeles to carry out a series of kills. It’s a little lighter on the action, but really underscores what can happen to people when they get caught up in the orbit of killers.

If you pick up Assassins Anonymous (and I hope you do!), you’ll get some of Mark’s insights on these movies. One of the things I did with his character was make him a movie buff. It’s a nod to a scene in The Professional, where Reno’s Leon sits in a theater by himself, watching Singing in the Rain with childlike wonder.

But I also figure: characters like this tend to be lonely. The life they lead necessitates it. Usually when they get too close to someone, that person can be exposed to countless dangers.

So what else to do, with all that spare time, than watch movies?